PHP 5.3 and Yii
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The highly anticipated PHP 5.3 is formally released. This version introduced many exciting features to the PHP language itself, such as namespaces, late static binding, closures, etc. It brings PHP to a new level. We hereby congratulate the PHP developer team!

Yii framework should be compatible with PHP 5.3. If you find any problem, please let us know. Thanks.

We are not going to exploit these new PHP 5.3 features in the near future in the core framework code for the following reasons:

1. Using the new features may introduce significant backward compatibility problem.

2. Using the new features would mean raising the basic requirements of using Yii to PHP 5.3. We expect that PHP 5.3 needs several minor releases before getting stable enough.

3. While namespace is cool, the strategy of prefixing all Yii core classes with letter 'C' works very well. It may be treated as a different form of namespace.

4. Late static binding would allow us to use Post::findAll() instead of Post::model()->findAll(). It is true that the former is more pretty; however, the latter also has its own benefits because Post::model() is an object instance and can be stored in a variable.

While the Yii core code does not use 5.3 elements, application code built on top of Yii has full freedom to exploit them.

We may consider rewriting Yii 2.0 on top of PHP 5.3, but this won't happen in the near future.

Please let us know if you have any comments on our decisions above. Thank you.

I know I will be using PHP 5.3 because I have control over the server environment (and by the time my project launches, PHP 5.3 will already be stable enough). Gotta love closures and late static binding.

Most of the shared hosting environments won't have 5.3 for at least a couple of months, I think it is a sane choice to have the core stay backward compatible.

I am a huge fan of Yii, so I really want to see Yii have great features.

For upgrading to PHP 5.3, this is just what I thought this afternoon. As PHP 5.3 is newer and may be better than 5.2, but it really needs time to prove this. Yii is a very strong and effient framwork for developing, so it must confirm that it can run on most of servers, which is for PHP 5.2.

And for PHP 5.3, I think it's great to support this on Yii 2.0. At that time, maybe 5.3 is everywhere, so we won't worry about the server problem.

That's my little advice for Yii developing, and I really hope Yii will get better and better in the future.

At last, I really appreciate for what you did. I can see you answered almost every questions in Chinese board. You're really my hero!

I love keeping up with the latest stable versions, although I never use brand new features out of PHP. I even dislike the idea of namespaces, as I mostly work on small projects and I don't need additional complexity.

Speaking of future plans - how many releases are planning to make in the 1.0.x branch, Qiang?

We will continue releasing 1.0.x, mainly to fix bugs, until December 31, 2010, the scheduled end of 1.0 maintenance. We expect future 1.0.x versions will be released in a slower pace (e.g. a release every 2 or 3 months).

In my humble opinion, I still wish Yii to keep ahead of other frameworks in exploiting the newest and greatest features/performances from PHP (like native MySQL driver, for performance). I'm doing ASP.NET C# for enterprise apps and I'm cheering for PHP as a programming language to get up to speed.

But, I do agree Yii should wait for sane number of months until one-third of shared hosting environments support PHP 5.3 (e.g. DreamHost) and few more future maintenance updates to stabilize PHP 5.3. I don't mind Yii breaking changes to support PHP 5.3, if we have a upgrade guide.

Keeping backwards compatibility is not always a win-win situation. Other frameworks, like Drupal for example, do not keep backwards compatiblity in each major version (minor versions are security-fixes), which means that third-party modules have to adapt to new versions. The big plus in this, is that you don't have to carry all the old-for-the-sake-of-compatibility stuff in each new version and has proved a wise decision so far. So my point is, Yii doesn't have to be backwards compatible in each new major version. If you wish to use PHP 5.3's new features, then do so in your next major revision, just document the changes and warn developers ahead from this.

i just updated my php from 5.2 to 5.3 in windows using apache server with 27Jul09 browscap.ini. but has met with problem occurred by either CHttpRequest::browser or get_browser or browscap.ini. none of my browsers can be detected by get_browser function. it stated:

i just updated my php from 5.2 to 5.3 in windows using apache server with 27Jul09 browscap.ini. but has met with problem occurred by either CHttpRequest::browser or get_browser or browscap.ini. none of my browsers can be detected by get_browser function. it stated:

Did anyone resolve this issue using 5.3 and yii.. I am hopeing someone has but this bug to rest...

Error 500
date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for 'PDT/-7.0/DST' instead